Ends tomorrow

The Lower Mainland’s newest online marketplace will open on Monday, April 28, when LikeItBuyItVancouver.com begins previewing a limited-time sale of everything from household goods to consumer electronics to cruises, travel, cars, gift cards and personal services.

columnists

Biography

Don Cayo came to The Sun as editorial page editor in 2000, after working most of his career in Eastern Canada. In the fall of 2003, he made the switch to column writing.

He has worked in journalism all his adult life. At one time or another he has served as a newspaper writer and editor, a radio and television
reporter and commentator, a wire service reporter, and a journalism teacher. From mid-1997 until mid-1999 he took a leave of absence to run
the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, a business-funded think-tank based in Halifax, but he continued to write regular columns for eight newspapers across Canada.

Cayo has won several awards and fellowships including one National Newspaper Award and three nominations, and a B'nai Brith award for human
rights reporting. In 2003 he won both the Population Institute's global award for population/environment reporting and a Canadian Association of Journalists fellowship to travel to Africa.

Taxes

If you’re irked by the backdoor tax hike my colleague Pete McMartin wrote about this week — the quiet lowering of the threshold for phasing out provincial homeowner grants that help cover property tax bills — there’s another one that may be even worse. McMartin’s original point was that in 2012 homeowners got the full grant ($570 for most people, although up to $770 in some circumstances) if their houses were worth $1.295 million or less, but for the last two years the cutoff to qualify has been reduced to $1.1 million. This equates to a de facto tax increase, he noted.

More

As managing director at Rogers Group Financial, Clay Gillespie is one of those financial advisers who’s riding the Grey Wave. The majority of his clients are retirees. Some of those clients are on a fixed income, and it’s Gillespie’s job to find them spending room. For some of them, he finds it their municipal taxes.

Asian buyers have for some time been putting pressure on Vancouver’s stock of detached homes. Now China’s development industry is showing interest in the region’s commercial properties. It is part of a cross-Canada trend, says Colliers International in a report issued earlier this month: “Canadian property owners have traditionally been the incumbent buyers of real estate assets, but a growing mix of international property investors, specifically Chinese developers, are seeking to park their capital in stable markets like Canada.”